20 Year Later: Revisiting the 2006 Calder Cup Championship

June 15, 2026

The air inside Milwaukee's Bradley Center was tense on June 15, 2006, but back home in Central Pennsylvania, a whole town was holding its breath. 20 years ago, a hungry Hershey Bears squad stepped onto enemy ice for Game 6 of the Calder Cup Finals, resolved not to let the formidable Milwaukee Admirals force a Game 7. What followed was a 5-1 masterclass in grit, skill, and sheer determination. When the final horn sounded, the Bears didn't just silence the Milwaukee crowd and hoist their ninth Calder Cup - they ignited a modern hockey dynasty. Two decades later, the echoes of that unforgettable championship run still resonate deeply through Chocolatetown.

"It's crazy to think it's been 20 years," team captain Boyd Kane said. "But you know what? We had a good group of older veterans as well as a good cast of young up-and-coming players that went on to play in the NHL, and a lot of great guys, and I think any time you win, it's obviously a big part of it - a lot of good memories playing with those guys."

Playoff hockey had long been synonymous with the Bears, but entering the team's 68th season, a malaise had fallen upon the historic franchise. The new car scent of a recently-opened GIANT Center was still fresh, but Hershey had gone eight straight seasons without an appearance in the Calder Cup Finals and had missed the postseason altogether in back-to-back years (something that had previously only happened twice in team history).

Still, there was reason for hope. The 2005-06 season began with a new affiliation for the Bears, reuniting with the Washington Capitals for the first time since the early 1980s after spending the previous nine seasons with the Colorado Avalanche. And the Bears would be coached by Bruce Boudreau, a veteran bench boss on the AHL circuit who had led the Manchester Monarchs to a division title the previous season.

"'Raise the Bar,' was our slogan at training camp during Bruce's first meeting at the Hershey Lodge," Bears forward Louis Robitaille said. "We were like, 'okay, what are we getting into, here?' It's going to be something special, and from day one we felt the group was ready to move on and progress."

Joining Boudreau behind the bench as assistant coach was Bob Woods, who carried with him the gravitas of having won a Calder Cup with the Bears as a player during their last championship in 1997.

"You don't have to look too hard...taking the guys out to the bench and tell them to look up in the rafters at the banners," Woods said. "They see that there's no division championships, there's no conference championships - all you see up there is Calder Cup championships. So you know where the bar is set."

Bears president and general manager Doug Yingst and Washington Capitals general manager George McPhee assembled a squad for Boudreau that was balanced from top to bottom, with experienced talent such as Kane, Dean Arsene, Graham Mink, Lawrence Nycholat, and Mark Wotton, combined with blossoming young prospects such as Tomáš Fleischmann, Mike Green, Eric Fehr, and Chris Bourque. Anchoring the group in net was goaltender Frédéric Cassivi, back for a second stint with the organization after winning a championship with Chicago in 2002 and had led the AHL with 10 shutouts in 2004-05 with Cincinnati.

"That leadership group was good, and with Bruce I think he knew how to get us up for games," Cassivi said. "When it's time to lower the emotion, when it's time to stay a little bit more even-keeled. Everybody had a role, and played that role perfectly."

As the season went on, the team continued to add pieces, notably bringing in Kris Beech and Colin Forbes. The group's ability to hold itself accountable was also noticeable.

"If we had a bad game, the next practice would be hell," Boudreau said. "If you had your head down, they were running you through a wall, because we weren't accepting to lose."

The support of the Capitals' management staff of Boudreau to make lineup decisions as he saw fit allowed the group to form a winning mentality.

"The greatest thing about the Caps that year, they said, 'If we send a first-round pick down and he's no good, don't play him. You're playing to win.'" Boudreau said. "Development is not only about developing players' skills and knowledge of the game, but developing how to win and what it feels like to win. You can look in the last 20 years - the Bears have consistently been from that year on and they've been able to bring up players to the National Hockey League that don't want to lose. I think that gets forgotten in so many ways when you're developing players in the minors."

With Boudreau and Woods behind the bench, the Bears orchestrated a respectable regular-season turnaround, going 44-21-5-10 to finish second in the East Division with 103 points, a 21-point improvement from the year before.

"The team just got along so well, we had so much fun together - and when we started out, we were pretty average," Boudreau said. "But by the time we reached the playoffs we were a tough team, and were as good as anybody in the playoffs. Teams didn't want to play us."

After breezing through the first two rounds of the playoff bracket with sweeps over Norfolk and Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, the Bears faced the Portland Pirates in the Eastern Conference Finals.

"I think the run will always be defined by the Eastern Conference Finals, because it is now 20 years down the road and I still think maybe the best series of hockey I've ever seen," said former Bears broadcaster John Walton.

In a twist of fate, many of the players who were now wearing Chocolate and White for Hershey were playing their former team, as Portland had been Washington's affiliate for the previous decade; the Pirates, meanwhile, had become an affiliate of the Anaheim Mighty Ducks and finished the regular season as the top team in the conference.

Cassivi and the Bears initially built a 3-1 series lead, but Portland fought back, winning Games 5 and 6 in Maine to force the series back to Hershey for a decisive Game 7, the first in GIANT Center history.

In the days leading up to the game, however, the Pirates received an infusion of young talent from their parent club, as top prospects Dustin Penner, Ryan Getzlaf, and Corey Perry were all loaned to Portland from Anaheim following the Ducks' elimination in the Stanley Cup Playoffs.

Hershey tied the decisive game after falling behind 2-0 and 3-2 in the first period, but Penner tallied his second of the contest in the middle frame to give the Pirates a 4-3 lead, and as the minutes ticked away in the third period, it looked like Hershey's season could be coming to a close. With under three minutes remaining the Bears went to work in the offensive zone, as Lawrence Nycholat slid a cross-ice pass to Fleischmann at the right circle, and the winger placed a shot into the pads of Jani Hurme, where Mink was able to jam the tying goal home.

In overtime, it was Eric Fehr who played the role of hero, unleashing a blast from the top of the right-wing circle to beat Hurme at 9:07 of the sudden-death period to lift the Bears past Portland 5-4 and send Hershey back to the Calder Cup Finals and the GIANT Center crowd into bedlam.

The win set up a date in the championship round with the Milwaukee Admirals, a team coached by former Bears star Claude Noël that had claimed the Calder Cup as recently as 2004. Milwaukee had won the West Division crown in the regular season and their path to the title round had been the reverse of Hershey, defeating the Iowa Stars in seven before sweeping Houston and regular-season champs Grand Rapids. The Admirals were led offensively by Darren Haydar, and bolstered defensively by Shea Weber on the blue line and Pekka Rinne in goal.

Despite dropping the opening game of the Finals 2-1 and falling behind 2-1 in the series through the first three games, the Bears were not deterred.

"As the year builds and you realize the team you have you start to think [a championship] is a possibility. As you get into the playoffs and you're going through it, you start to realize there's something there and we have a good chance," Kane said. "For me, it was when we got to Milwaukee and we lost Game 1, and even after losing, I can remember thinking we had a good chance. We didn't have our best game, but realizing where we were at, I felt we had a good shot at winning that series."

By this point, the mentality that the team had built throughout the season allowed them to ride a wave of confidence and purpose.

"We were big, we were physical, we had no fear," Robitaille said. "We were a relentless group, playing with fun, and playing with a lot of confidence. And I think being young and reckless, I think that made the identity of that group special."

After the series shifted back to Hershey and with the support of a full-throated home crowd, the Bears took over in Game 4, scoring four goals on five shots in the opening 9:14 on their way to a 7-2 blowout.

In Game 5 Hershey again opened up a 4-0 lead on the Admirals, and then held on as Milwaukee pushed back in the final half of the contest, saved by a critical power-play goal from Mike Green midway through the third and a breakaway stop by Cassivi on Simon Gamache in the final minute of play to preserve an eventual 6-4 victory and send the series back to the Bradley Center with the opportunity to close out the Admirals.

Once again, the Bears came out roaring, taking a 2-0 lead before the six-minute mark on goals from Joey Tenute and Jakub Klepiš and building a 4-0 edge by the second minute of the second period. There would be little pushback from the Admirals, save for a power-play goal from Haydar. Hershey's defense otherwise locked down Milwaukee, giving Cassivi, who had played every minute of the playoffs the confidence that the dream of a Calder Cup championship was about to be realized.

"The way the third period was going, we knew we had control of the game, and it was going to happen," Cassivi said. "So as the final seconds came off the clock, just the excitement with the group, and after the buzzer sounded and we realized we did it, the emotion that came through was just unbelievable."

The final score: Hershey 5, Milwaukee 1. The Bears had reached the summit once again, on the back of their depth, relentlessness, and the MVP play of their veteran goaltender after a two-month grind through the postseason.

"I just remember Freddy throwing his skates in the garbage can. He was like, 'I'm done!' because his feet were killing him. We had to open a new pair of skates for him to be in the team photo at GIANT Center," Robitaille said. "But it was being with our family and friends, and having beer and champagne and pizza in our stall, heading to the plane and coming back to Harrisburg and having all of those fans. The pressure to win is there, and they want a winner, and they're behind you. The fun that we had as a group and sharing that moment with the entire city - going from place to place. It was amazing."

The players involved in that memorable championship run that spring have long since retired. But the foundation laid by the 2005-06 Bears has been immeasurable to the organization, serving as a bridge from its storied history during the heyday of Hersheypark Arena to the modern era. Hershey made it back to the championship round the following year, and won back-to-back Calder Cups in 2009 and 2010. Over the last 21 seasons - starting with the 2005-06 squad - Hershey has made seven trips to the Calder Cup Finals and has won five championships, and its 13 all-time Calder Cups serves as a record in the American Hockey League.

"I think 2006 was the year the GIANT Center went from being a house to being a home," Walton said. "You needed those moments in that building because all of the memories of the franchise that people cherished weren't in that building, so to be able to have the run they did - to beat Portland where that overtime winner was the first big, big, big moment in that building - and now there has been a lot of them, but at the time we hadn't had any yet. [...] Those are what make Hershey Bears hockey what it is now. A lot of it was born out of that, and it really set the table for what has been an unbelievable two decades with the Capitals."

By Jesse Liebman, Bears media specialist

Photo credit: Scott Paulus